Controlling How You Get Feedback from Clients And Your Team: Introducing Influence

We receive a lot of feedback from clients and teammates, some of which we solicit and some which we do not. What we don't want is detailed, nitpicky feedback when we're presenting a new idea to a client. Likewise, we usually want very detailed feedback when we present hi-fi wireframes to clients. So we thought: wouldn't it be nice if we had an app to help us control what type of feedback our clients would give us?

Different Ways to Solicit Feedback

We started to touch upon a few of these already, but there are numerous ways you can get feedback from clients and teammates:

You might want to simply guide people through a few mockups over the phone without soliciting any detailed feedback. You just want a poor man's Webex without much setup: throw up a few screens up there, share a private link with your client, and control what they see on their screen as you talk on the phone.

You might not want to get on the phone with your clients or teammates and ask for their opinions on a few visual explorations. Do they like it? No? A quick "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" does the trick. If you want more detailed feedback, you can let them leave a comment on each mockup after they give their "thumbs up" or "thumbs down."

Finally, you might want very detailed feedback about final wireframes. In this case, you'll need to give people specific directions and an ability to leave annotations on each mockup in your design presentation.

Summary of Feedback All in One Place

The trick, of course, isn't just controlling how you get feedback. You also have to make sense of it. It's really painful to ask for feedback then sort through 40-odd notes and comments to figure out what people think about your mockups. So ideally you want a quick summary that summarizes all your feedback.

You want one place where you can see all the thumbs up, comments, and annotations. This makes it easier to scan through your feedback. By doing so, you'll be able to drive the design process forward more quickly and iterate on your mockups faster.

Introducing Influence

By this point in the blog post, you might be wondering — what is this app that ZURBians are using to control the feedback they get from clients? Remember the little app we launched back in August to help you present your design ideas and reel in the feedback?

Today, we're excited to announce the private release of Reel's mother app Influence - a quick way to present new design ideas for feedback. We recognized that presenting design ideas, controlling and making sense of feedback you get was a problem for any freelancer, contractor, or company that is designing products. We created Influence to solve this problem.

We'll start letting early adopters in today to check out Influence and give us feedback (about an app to control how you get feedback — no pun intended!). For now you can sign up and we'll let you in soon!